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There are various phases in software development life cycle (SDLC). Software performance testing is one of the significant phases within the software development cycle (SDCL). Different types of testing are employed in each phase beginning with development till it reaches the market. From the initial development of the application until it reaches the maketing phase different testing types will be used. The software itself also comes in different varieties, which all require testing before they’re released on the market.

Software for web applications is one type of software. With the advent of the Internet web software has significantly increased in importance, as the Internet has had a substantial impact on our daily lives. The majority of the security threats start off from Internet and it is necessary to make sure that the web software is carefully tested prior to releasing to the costumer.

The time available to develop and test web software is always limited. While the web software is being designed and developed it is also being tested by the testings engineers using different types of tests. The different types of tests can be grouped in code testing, load testing, compatibility testing, functional testing and regression testing.

The web software is usually released by means of a model of software release known as alpha/beta testing.Alpha testing is a replicated or real ready testing by would-be users/customers or a separate testing team on the developers’ location. This testing will be upon incomplete software and will be tested for small parts of the software. Software that passed the alpha test will not be released till all the major functionalities of the software are built and tested.

After the alpha testing is completed the software is permitted to undergo the beta phase of testing. In beta testing the web software I completely built. The software is made available for use to a restricted number of customers intended for software testing previous to the official release. In case of website design it is easy to put together the various pages as the website design uses HTML. So the alpha/beta technique is generally not used for website development. This is because HTML coding makes it very easy to design independent web pages that can afterwards being easily integrated so the design team can code and test each page independently.

Code testing refers to the process where the testing or development engineer verifies the code and make sure that there are no software bugs. Web development is a very rapid process so the abscence of bugs is required. A popular method used by experienced programmers for bug free coding is the paired-programming.

Two coders working at a single workstation it is at the core of paired programming. The developer typing the code is called the driver while the programmer that checks every line of code as it is produced is called the observer or the navigator. Support for this methodology is provided by some research data produced by Laurie Williams at University of Utah in Salt Lake City. According to this research paired programmers produce code with 15% less bugs while only being 15% slower than individual programmers.

The fact that the software is tested many times during the development process should provide a bug free software by the end of it. Load testing is done to see at what point the application fails or the performance reduces when under heavy loads such as multiple users on or heavy server traffic. Load testing will provide information regarding the amount of users that could connect simustaneosly to a site, the number of transactions that the system can cope at the same time and its responsiveness under different circumstances or amount of traffic.

Compatibility testing evaluates the application’s compatibility with the computing environment like the operating system, database, browser compatibility, backwards compatibility, computing capacity of the hardware platform and compatibility of the peripherals.

Functional testing confirms its specifications and accurately performs all of the required tasks. This involves doing a series of tests that perform a feature by feature validation of behavior, utilizing a wide range of normal and erroneous input data. Regression testing is carried out to check that any changes made to the code in order to enhance it or to fix defects has not affected any functionality.

When interative methodology is used to develop software regression testing is crucial. Iterative software development is a method in which new functionality is added to existing software. In this case one should make sure that the new addition has not affected any of the existing functionality. Regression testing is done to find out any of such instances. The above mentioned methods are essential tests to complete the web software testing.